SGI's outreach program will provide 20 supercomputing systems to Ohio's minority institutions -- Central State University (CSU) and Wilberforce University (WU) with technical support provided by the University of Dayton. OSC's Cluster Ohio Project, a program to distribute processors to faculty statewide, will be granting similar processors to faculty in June.

Ken Coleman, SGI executive vice president of global sales, service and marketing, said, "SGI is extremely pleased to partner with OSC to develop and promote the use of industry commodity clusters for high performance computing applications based on an Intel IA32 and IA64 architecture and an open source Linux operating system. We look forward to solidifying our partnership and delivering unsurpassed computing capabilities to researchers all over the country."

OSC will support the systems by collaborating with the University of Dayton's Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments, WU's Engineering and Computing Departments, and CSU's Mathematics and Computer Science Departments.

"SGI's donation enables us to kick off the Cluster Ohio Project by establishing three universities as test site," said Al Stutz, OSC High Perfromance Computing Director. "We will be able to assist the state's two minority institutions by locating a 14-processor SGI cluster at their campuses. The project also calls for a collaborative relationship with Dayton, Wilberforce and Central State in terms of curriculum development and research."

The collaboration will create two remote clusters: fourteen systems will be housed at Wilberforce University and the other six at the University of Dayton.

The systems will be used to support academic courses and research conducted by the two remote sites. The Cluster will assist the development of a common curriculum and courses in parallel computing and computational science at each university.

Robert Marcus, CSU assistant professor, commented, "I have been a member of OSC's Statewide User's Group for many years. OSC has long been a center of excellence for research and teaching in high performance computing, and I am very pleased to join this collaboration in developing new, exciting curricula in computational science for undergraduate education."

About SGI, Inc. SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) is the world's leader in high-performance computing technology and manufacturing of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. They deliver their advanced computing to scientific, educational, engineering and large enterprise communities. SGI is known for its enormous contributions to a variety of charities.

About OSC OSC is Ohio's flagship center for high performance computing, networking, educational outreach, and information technology. OSC empowers its academic, industrial, and government partners to make Ohio the education and technology state of the future.